I've been working the past two days on debian-cd, which was the main
thing (besides git-annex assistant) I planned to work on at DebCamp.

Yesterday, Steve McIntyre and I cleaned up some cruft in debian-cd's
package lists. This freed somewhere in the area of 30 mb. I also took a
grep through d-i and made sure the CDs include packages that d-i can
optionally install in some situations.

Today, I investigated how Recommends are ordered on the CD, and concluded
it's as close to optimal as can be easily achieved. So was not able to save
space there, but I did find a way to reorganize the desktop task that avoids
needing to include a lot of printing stuff and some other stuff on the
first CD. While that helped some, it still didn't get either Gnome or Kde
to entirely fit, so getting there will probably involve rebuilding 100 or
so packages with xz, if someone decides to do that.

So it's stil TBD whether Gnome or Kde will fit on a single CD in Debian
wheezy. At this point I think most of us are getting tired of fighting this
increasingly losing battle every release, and so other options like only
having a desktop DVD are looking more appealing, as they solve the problem
long-term. This would also free up the first CD for other interesting
use cases, perhaps xfce, or perhaps a CD targeted at server users, and/or
containing high-popularity non-desktop packages.

comment 1
I think a cli-only CD (optionally with XFCE or the like) would be an acceptable way out of this. Requiring a DVD for KDE/Gnome should not be a problem in this day and age. Some input from places with bad connectivity (India, Arabic peninsula etc) would be good, though. Those are the people most likely affected by this imo.
Comment by
Richard
— terribly early Monday morning, July 9th, 2012

I wonder what method Ubuntu uses - it is definitely not debian-cd though. Maybe their method could be adapted to later releases.

I think having a CD install even a basic GNOME/KDE is important. Significant regions of India do not have high bandwidth connectivity, a CD takes about 6-8 hrs to download, and a DVD would make it much worse.

If it not at all possible to fit GNOME/KDE, then a single CD Xfce version would be excellent.